I'm a new dm looking for advice on a potentially(?) problematic player. One of the players in our group consistently runs off. she sees herself as "the wild card" and likes to break off from the focus of the rest of the party. She even seems to enjoy when the other players become exasperated or frustrated with her. Occassionally this leads to fun or interesting scenario, but it just as often leads to other players becoming frustrated or derailing the entire party to wander through the forest for half an hour with no particular reason or goal.

an example:

there was a scenario in one of our campaigns where the party was traveling in the back of a wagon through a forest towards a quest objective. The player in question is playing a druid character who they like to roleplay as being particularly feral and animalistic. While i'm describing the party's passage through the forest she asks if she can smell anything interesting. trying to be descriptive, i say something along the lines of "You mostly smell the contents of the wagon, rations, etc. outside is the smell of moist earth, trees, and fungus/rot" to which her immediate reation is "i jump out of the cart and run into the forest towards the rotting smell" The other party memberes were alarmed by her suddenly running off so they go into the forest after her. This seems to be one of the main problems we have. Because this player runs off, they become the defacto leader of the party because the other players only have the options of either: follow along (regardless of whether they wanna keep moving towards the quest objective or not), or let her run off and end up splitting up the party (which nobody wants to do).

After it was clear she wasnt gonna turn back, (despite the protests of the other players,) the way i resolved the problem at the time was will a willow the wisp: "you see a faint light in the distance, calling you deeper into the forest, It seems to move away from you as you approach." etc. and when she still didnt turn back, it eventually led her into an ambush. The whole party then retreated back onto the main path and i ended up working the ambush into the plot, with some intrigue about what they encountered ("you've never seen this kind of monster before. it doesnt seem like a natural inhabitant of the forest" etc.) which turned into a mystery for them to solve later.

This worked fine for this scenrio but i dont really wanna have to keep hedging players in by putting monsters and ambushes to the sides of the path. (especially since things like this are happening fairly consistently.) I wanna let players be creative and explore, and if the whole party could agree it would be fine, but it seems to be mostly one character derailing everyone else who would rather be moving the plot forward. Then I have to come up with some scenario that puts her back on track with everyone else.